Rock U - Connections - Connections - Overview

Transcribed Video Content

So let's look at the connection features within Rock. This is just gonna be a quick overview of those features, but we're gonna go through them in detail in in future videos. Now, the connections features are really meant to fill in cracks within your ministry. Without accountability and without systems and processes, there's cracks all over your ministry. And we're gonna try to reduce those cracks and keep people from falling into them. So for instance, if people are raising their hands and saying, hey, I wanna get involved in, some kind of ministry or or in in volunteering, from the point where they raise their hand to the point where they're actually connected, to that volunteer opportunity, that's where a lot of cracks can can show up. And so it's really a shame when people wanna get involved with the ministry, but don't because of, just the cracks that staff are just letting people fall into. So that's where the connection tools come into play. They really help from that point when someone raises their hand of interest to the point where they're actually connected to a specific ministry. Now, we're gonna walk through some examples. The examples and and what comes out of the box is really for volunteering. But these connection tools are are useful in so many other ways. So don't get stuck by thinking inside the box of just for involvement or volunteering. Think about all the different areas that you need to have some accountability and some process from where people where you're trying to move from people from one place to another. Okay? So I almost think it's a little bit of a disservice that we just did. Think one example coming out of the box with just volunteering. This can be used in so many other ways. Okay. So it is volunteering. So let's just look at it from the context of how to get involved with serving. So if you were to go to the external website and you were to go under connect serve, you would see this simple little search interface. Okay. So it allows you to search by campus and by preference area, days of the week, enroll. And based on what you select and you hit search, you'll see different connection opportunities show up below that. Okay. Now, is gonna be key because we're gonna see this a little later. These different search criteria are actually different attributes on these connection opportunities. Okay. So now, what the user would do is they would actually pick one that's of interest to them and that would provide them with more information about that opportunity. So pictures, some deeper description, and the different, days of the week and preference area and, role type. Now, if this is an opportunity that they are interested in pursuing, they would then hit the connect button and they would fill out a quick little form and then they would be put into the connection system. So let's look at the different components of the connection system and using again the context of giving or connection. So here is the involvement connection type. Okay. So that's the top level. You have these different connection types. And again, we we come out of the box with involvement and which is also serving. A connection type will have different opportunities. So in this case, we're kinda highlighting the usher opportunity but there could be a greeter opportunity, there could be a kids opportunity, and so forth. And so what will happen is as people get interested, they will have connection requests tied to these opportunities. So in this case, have three different, connection requests all tied to ushers. And then what's gonna happen is these staff members or lay leaders that we call connectors are gonna kinda step into this process and they're gonna be working with these, requesters to get them connected. Now, lot of times that connected, this means that they'll be dropped into a group. So, in this case, we have these green boxes that represent different groups. And so the goal in this kind of use case is that we wanna make sure that we get one of these people assigned to the proper serving group. So in this case, we're trying to get, the the requester tied to Usher's noon. So this connector has obviously talked to them. They've kind of talked about, , their schedule and determined that Usher's noon would be the the right place. So again, this slide is just basically showing you the the basic components of, the connection system, which are types. And again, out of the box, Rock comes with one for involvement. Then you're gonna have opportunities, which are the different areas that you can get connected to. Requests, people make a request to join a certain area. And then the connectors are really the the volunteers or the lay leaders or the staff who are who are trying to get these people, all tied to a specific group or just connected in general. Okay. So let's walk through an example. In this case, Sarah Sims has gone out to the website. She's looked at the different opportunities and she's actually, registered to get connected. Okay. So at this point, everything's kind of blank. Her state is active. Her status is no contact. No one's made contact with her yet. And there's not been a connector assigned to her. Okay. So the next step in step two, Alicia Marble will make herself the connector for this request, which means that she's gonna be helping and working with Sarah to walk her through the process of getting connected. In this case, she's gonna mark the status as in process. So she's now starting to work on this connection, request and move it through the the process. And she's actually done one activity. Okay. So she called but she didn't get an answer. Okay. So that's step two. Step three is that Alicia has called back. This time she did follow-up, , she did contact her. She was able to make contact. But then in this case, Sarah says, what? Something changed in my job. I, , I really can't get connected here. Got to put this on pause for four weeks. Now, in a lot of, , other systems what would happen is you'd be looking at this for four weeks in your inbox and you'd have to kind of make a mental note to come back to it when the time was right. But in Rock, there's a state called future follow-up. And what's in that state, you can actually give it a date of when that future follow-up is time to be followed up on. So in this case, it can actually go away. You can kind of not see it anymore. You don't have to look at it. Of course, you can if you want to find it. You can still find it but for the most part it's gonna stay out of your view until this date comes up. Okay. So in step four here that date has come up. So Alicia gets it back and she's looking at it and she calls again. In this case, she is able to connect, Sarah to a serving opportunity. And in that discussion, they've chosen that the noon service time is probably the best one for her. So Alicia's actually linked her in into this group, through the connection. And optionally, now what you're gonna see is workflows work very much hand in hand with connections. So in this case, another workflow was kicked off to send training material to Sarah. And this could either be just an email with an attachment or it could be even more complex where you have you're basically walking Sarah through some training and maybe even quizzing her on some of those items. So that's just an example of one connection process. Now, what you see on the inside is something this. Okay. So what we're seeing here is is the kind of the dashboard for connections. So let's go ahead and let me just flip over and show you that. Okay. And so you're gonna find that under people, connections because connections is all about people. And when you come in here, you're gonna see the the various connection types. So we see involvement here and underneath that we're gonna see the different opportunities, that have been configured. Now, note here up at the top, I'm choosing to look at all requests. Okay? A lot of times what you'll do is you actually say, just show me my requests. In this case, none are assigned to me so I don't see very much. So then I might switch back over to see this. But in general, when I start assigning these to myself, I might wanna just see my requests Or it could be that the workflow that you use assigns them to me and so I always wanna just see my requests. You can also note that there are, , little little dots here that kinda warn you and when some things are unassigned or they're assigned to me or they're in a critical status or even more in an idle status, means there's no activity in in 14. So this allows you to kind of see where your issues might be. In our sample data here, , a lot of them have critical and I and are idle. Below that, you'll see their connection request for the opportunity that you select. Now, you want to be careful about these filters because a lot of times these filters are gonna keep you from being able to see what you want. So I'm just gonna kinda clear out my filters here. Okay. So now I can actually see the items. So from here, I might click on it and look at a request. So from here, can start editing some of this information. I can put pick a placement group to drop them into. I can transfer it to a different, opportunity. And this is helpful when maybe you're talking with them on the phone and they say, what, , children's maybe isn't for me, maybe I want to be an usher. And then, you can go ahead and change the status over to no contact, which is the default. Add a note for that person who's gonna be receiving it over there and hit the transfer. I'm not gonna do that in this case. Then down below, you can look at the different activities that have happened. So in this case, maybe you're gonna make a phone call, you can come over here and define, an activity of called and you can leave a little note about the phone call that you made. And these activities as we'll see, you can customize this list and change it. And you can also mark the connector. So it's by default, it's gonna be you but you can actually do this for other people. Okay. So now you'll notice that this activity is in blue. What you can do too is you can actually see some of the activities that are happening on other, opportunities. So it's sometimes common that Brian might go out there and get a little ambitious and he might start be putting connection requests in for multiple opportunities. And this allows you to see the activities across all of those opportunities. And that's a great thing because as you're making contact with them, you can have that conversation and say, hey, I see you're also, , working and talking with the ushers. These two opportunities may not be, you may not be able to do both at the same time because they meet at the same time. So let's just have that kind of conversation and it shows you the full scope of what's going on. Okay. So that's kind of a a high level overview of processing of of connections. When you're all done with that, you will hit the connect and then that will make change the status to connect. And for the most part, at that point, you're you're pretty much done with the request. So a little tip here is that the connection process as we noted works better with workflows. So here we've actually created some workflows here. These are manual workflows. So a manual workflow on a on a connection request allows you to push this button instantiate those, or start those those workflows for you. Now, some of these might actually, take you to a form that you need to input more information or some of them might just say, hey, there's no form. I've started the workflow and allows you to continue. So just know that as you're working through how to use connections, you definitely want to consider workflows. Now, I mentioned too that there's different with you should be using connections for lots of different things other than serving. These are just a few examples of other churches who are using it in some pretty clever ways. So Fellowship Greenville has shared with us two ways that I thought I'd pass on. One is really connecting to get into a financial coaching or a counseling opportunity. So in their case, they don't want people just to, let's say, jump right into these, classes or these opportunities, for ministry. They really wanna talk through the process, make sure that they're picking the right one, making sure that they fill the the, requirements for each. So instead of using a good event registration, which in some cases might be a good choice, they've opted to use the connection features, which allows you again to have that more personalized touch. You still have the accountability which is super important, but, it's another example of using connections outside of volunteer opportunities. They also shared too that if they wanted to get more information about a ministry, they were using connections. Again, you could use a workflow for this in this case, but the connection features have a lot of built in features to track follow-up through those activities. And I think as you dig in deeper, you'll see some of the really neat customizations that you can do with connections. And so in this case, they actually used connections as their contact mechanism. And again, I think for the accountability and this some of the features it brings, that's a really good choice. So again, don't think in the box. I know a lot of the, information that we as we dive in a little bit deeper will be on volunteering and and signing up for volunteering but don't get stuck in that box. So that is the connection features at a high level.